My Crazy Life

This post is basically going to be a rant about how stressful things have been around here for the last few months so if you want to skip it, I won’t be offended. On the other hand, if you want to get an idea of why I’ve been enormously absentee from social gatherings, blogging, and life in general, stick around. Ready or not, here we go:

In mid-June Kevin applied for a new job. He was in no danger of losing his current job, but he saw an opportunity to take a step up professionally and decided to throw his hat into the ring. Twelve hours after he submitted the online application, he got the first phone call. Within a week and a half he had six interviews and at the final interview he learned that things had been narrowed down to only two candidates, Kevin being one of them. The job was for Adobe and the whole company pretty much shuts down for the entire week surrounding the 4^th of July which is great for them but not so much for the guy who just completed a bunch of interviews and is waiting to hear back about whether or not he got the job. Needless to say, the waiting was stressful.

Good news is that once the waiting was over he got the job. He gave notice at his current job, giving them three weeks so that the health insurance on both ends would give us the coverage we needed. He had planned to complete a big project during those three weeks, but once he told them he was quitting they decided they didn’t want him to do it. So instead he spent three weeks twiddling his thumbs waiting for the new job to start. It made him crazy and made those three weeks seem loooooong for him.

Once he actually started at Adobe, it took a few weeks for him to feel like he had any idea of what he was doing and to have enough work to fill his days. Now he is getting into the swing of things and is feeling pretty good about the whole thing.

Matthew has been a huge stress bomb as well. During all this job stuff, he was getting ready to start first grade. First grade is a big deal, especially for a food allergy kid who will be eating lunch at school. He was really stressed about his teacher knowing about all his needs and it took us a good week of trying before I was actually able to talk with her and help dial back some of his concerns. He was also worried about whether or not he would know anyone in his class. And he didn’t know his teacher so he was worried about what she would be like. He was in tears nearly every day about all this.

And then we dumped the “Dad is quitting his job and going to work for Adobe” bomb on him. It really shouldn’t have been a big deal, but it totally freaked Matthew out. It was so bad that he started having nightmares. Things like Kev and I were on a vacation and Nathan and Matthew were left home alone and they didn’t have a phone number to call us. Another one was about going to eat lunch with Kev at his new job and when we arrived the entire building was gone. They pretty much reeked of abandonment issues and as much as we reassured him that nothing would be different at home, he just couldn’t stop panicking. He freaked out when Kev was in Washington D.C. for an entire week earlier this year and I think part of his panic was that Kev would be gone like that again.

Nathan was stressed out because he was in limbo land about who his fifth grade teacher would be. Because we are in year round school, they only had three weeks between one school year and the next which you would think would not be enough time to work up a real stress attack, but you would be wrong. Our school definitely doesn’t help that. The new school year started on July 25^th. July 24^th was a holiday and our school didn’t post teacher assignments until 4:00 p.m. on July 23^rd. I know they do it because they don’t want to deal with all the parents who are unhappy about the teacher their kid was assigned, but honestly it is ridiculous. They are either going to deal with it the week before school starts or on the first day of school. Just postponing letting everyone know which teacher they have doesn’t make that go away. But it made Nathan super stressed out for three weeks. At least once he know which teacher he had and knew that he would have a few friends in his class he was able to calm down.

Daniel just started 7^th grade and although he didn’t actually admit it until a couple of days before school started, he was stressed out to. Seventh grade is a big change and although he was excited as well, there was a lot of uncertainty about how things would be. And he had a whole extra month to stew about it once the other boys went back to school. He was also headed to the weeklong scout camp for the first time so we had to get him all ready to go. He only had some dehydration once at scout camp and luckily for him (and us), his leaders knew what they were dealing with early enough that they were able to get him rehydrating without needing medical care.

Malia did pretty well, being too young to comprehend the stress of her whole family. She did however, get sick twice and have that instacare visit when she whacked her head on the counter.

As for me, when all this started in June I was at the point where I was having headaches every single day. So in addition to trying to keep my entire family from going bat crap crazy because of stress, I was trying out a variety of new treatment methods and changing some routines in an attempt to get the headaches under control. I was also neck deep in paperwork trying to get all the forms Matthew needs to get the care he needs at school, for Matthew and Daniel to be able to have their meds at school, to update insurance info everywhere, to allow Daniel to go to scout camp, etc.

Now overlay on top of all that the pox we’ve all had (the week we all had a cold was Kev’s first week at Adobe, Nathan and Matthew’s second full week of school, and Daniel’s week at scout camp and the second round of sick was the week just before Daniel started school with Malia’s sick lingering into his first week), a new mortgage (we had an opportunity to refinance at a lower interest rate which meant a lower monthly payment) and the fact that Daniel is now on a traditional school calendar while Nathan and Matthew are still on a year round school calendar which leads to scheduling chaos and you’ve got a pretty good picture of how we spent our summer.

We are finally at the point where I feel like we are getting back into a routine and I cannot tell you how good and ready we all are to have hit a new normal. My daily life, as crazy as it can be, is a welcome relief compared to what we have just survived.